Confession

Big Idea: Confessing sins to one another enhances authenticity, community, shared strength, personal relief from pretense, and deeper forgiveness, reminding us that we don’t struggle alone.

I used to have this problem. As a child, my beliefs caused me few problems. However, when I became a teenager, I faced a new challenge: temptation. At that age, you encounter peer pressure, physical attraction, and a desire for independence. It led to a troubling feeling within me. I felt isolated. I felt all alone, as if I was somehow abnormal in struggling with sins and temptations.

You see, in church, everyone had it together. I never saw anyone struggle with sin. The preacher never even hinted at his own temptations. And it didn’t help that the only verse that came to mind was this one:

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

The first part was somehow comforting: No temptation has seized me except what is common to man. That was good. But then the whole question became: “Nobody seems to struggle with temptation in my church. What’s wrong with either me?”

I remember a pastor saying he hadn't struggled with temptation in over 30 years of walking with the Lord. That made me feel even worse. Eventually, I made an appointment with my pastor and poured out my soul to him. The end result was that I found out I wasn’t abnormal. For some reason, he could agree with me in private that what I was going through was normal, and a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. But the preaching never changed. Privately, we could acknowledge our struggles, but publicly, especially from the pulpit, we had to act like we had everything under control.

I'm not saying we should share all our flaws, but why do we have to act like we're never tempted or sin? Why do we believe our struggles must remain private and that we can't openly share our temptations with others? Many of our churches give the impression of having everything together, but inside, we often feel isolated and struggling, questioning if we're alone in our struggles. I came across these words by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy… He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone.

That’s how I felt a lot of the time – alone in my sins, living in lies and hypocrisy.

Some years ago, I began to break out of this mold. You’ll notice I try to be pretty frank about struggles and weaknesses. I’m done with pretending and putting on false pretenses. Within the limits of common sense, let’s be real. Let’s let each other know that we have struggles too. This process builds community and helps us resist temptation, showing us that we are not alone.

I used to think that confession was something we did privately. I certainly hope that you regularly confess your sins to God.

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (1 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:8-9)

We should spend time alone with God to reflect on the categories of sin mentioned in the Bible, such as the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. We need to take responsibility for our actions and realize how easy it is to lead a deceitful life. Certainly, I think we should practice confession as part of our regular prayer life with God. I think we’ve benefited from the Reformation teaching that we’re all priests. We don’t need an intermediary besides Jesus Christ to confess our sins to God. We don’t need a priest or a confession box – we just have to go to God directly.

But listen here: We’ve gone too far. We’ve abandoned something good in all of this, and what we’ve abandoned is very important. Even Luther believed in mutual, brotherly confession. He wrote, “Therefore, when I admonish you to go to confession, I am admonishing you to be a Christian.”

James 5:14-16 says:

Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.

The context is an illness. James just assumes that when we’re ill, one of the questions we’re going to ask is, “Is this illness the result of sin?” It isn’t always, but sometimes God uses physical illness as a means of disciplining his children. It’s at least a question we should ask. But as we examine our lives and confess our sins, we’re not to do it alone, but to each other.

The question we should ask is, “Why?” “Why should we confess our sins to one another – why not just God?” We run into problems in another passage. John 20:23 says, "If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." That’s a pretty powerful passage! Somehow we have the privilege of announcing forgiveness to others. We’ve lost something valuable in our tradition if we don’t confess our sins to each other, as the Bible instructs.

Advantages of Confession

Let me list some advantages to confessing our sins to one another.

It lets us know that we’re not alone.

We believe we are a group of saints, but in reality, we often act more like a group of sinners. Richard Foster writes:

We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin... We imagine that we are the only ones who have not stepped onto the high road to heaven. Therefore, we hide ourselves from one another and live in veiled lives and hypocrisy.”

We need to learn that we’re in the battle together. We should realize that we are not alone in our sins; our brothers and sisters face the same temptations—fear, pride, and others. We find out in mutual confession that we’re a community of people struggling together. What a relief it is to know that I’m not the only one left alone in my sins!

One of the things that the new generation demands is that the church “gets real.” They want authenticity – they smell phoniness a mile away. Let’s offer them this authenticity – it’s biblical after all. Let’s be open and honest about our struggles, and we all won’t feel so isolated after all.

Dallas Willard goes so far as to say that lack of confession hinders our fellowship together. “Confession alone makes deep fellowship possible, and the lack of it explains much of the superficial quality so commonly found in our church associations.” Confession deepens our fellowship and lets us know we’re not alone.

There's a second advantage to confession:

It lifts a huge weight off of us – the weight of pretending.

Gordon MacDonald, a respected pastor and author, kept a sin secret for a time before it was made public. In reflecting on his sin and trying to hide it, he wrote:

Almost no one bears a heavier load than the carrier of personal secrets of the past or the present…The person who carries a secret has sentenced himself to a dungeon… I know what it is like to live with a secret. And having dissolved that secret before God, my loved ones, and the church, I know what it is like to live once again in the light.

Dallas Willard writes, “We lay down the burden of hiding and pretending, which normally takes up such a dreadful amount of human energy. We engage and are engaged by others in the most profound depths of the soul.”

Sharing your secret struggles with another believer in Christ can bring great relief and help lift the burden of your sin.

There's a third benefit:

It helps us avoid sin.

Proverbs 28:13 says, "He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy." In this verse, the confessing and the renouncing are tied together. Closeness and confession force out evildoing. Confessing our sins and having someone pray for us provides extra strength in our struggles.

I struggled with a temptation, so I reached out to a genuine believer from church for help. I went to him, explained my problem, and made a deal with him. Every time that I fell into this temptation, I had to sit down and write him a letter explaining just how I blew it.

Let me tell you, that worked! There’s nothing like old-fashioned shame and embarrassment to make one think twice before falling into sin. But the accountability that comes from confessing sins to one another makes it worth it. It even allows the other person to pray for us in that area.

Here's a fourth benefit to confession:

It helps us to appropriate forgiveness.

Psalm 103:12 says, "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."

When we sin, after we confess our sins to God, it often doesn’t feel as if our sins have been removed very far from us. Satan is known as the accuser, and he often reminds us of our sins even after we've confessed and received God's forgiveness. So many Christians live with a false sense of guilt, not realizing that their sins are forgiven.

Richard Foster writes:

We have prayed, even begged for forgiveness, and though we hope we have forgiven, we sense no release. We doubt our forgiveness and despair at our confession. We fear that perhaps we have made confession only to ourselves and not to God. The haunting sorrows and hurts of the past have not been healed….[But] God has given us our brothers and sisters to stand in Christ’s stead and make God’s presence and forgiveness real to us.

The Book of Common Prayer contains these words:

If there be any of you who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein but require further comfort or counsel, let him come to me or to some other minister of God’s word, and open his grief.

Bonhoeffer argues that private confession of sin keeps it hidden, while confessing in front of another person brings it to light and allows us to experience God's presence through them.

So, we need confession. It helps us know we’re not alone. It lifts the weight of pretending. It helps us conquer sin. And it makes real for us God’s forgiveness.

Practical Steps

Practical hint: A key decision in practicing this discipline is choosing whom to confess to. While theologically every Christian believer can receive the confession of another, let’s state the obvious. As a general rule, choose someone of the same gender. Consider confessing to your spouse, but avoid doing so with someone of the opposite sex to prevent potential issues. I believe there are certain things we need to confess that only someone of the same gender can truly understand. Some experiences in my life are only understandable to another man, just as there are aspects of your experience that I can't fully grasp as a man.

Pray that God will bring someone into your life with discretion and maturity. Confidences can be abused. You need someone you can trust. Ask God to show you someone who is spiritually mature, compassionate, sensible, trustworthy, and has a sense of humor. Find someone with the right skills.

Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline has a great section on receiving a confession that I can share with you. You need someone who can gently drag out the confession from you. There will be times you will need their help to be honest. You need someone who understands themselves and humanity deeply, who won't be shocked by your mistakes. This person will listen quietly and ultimately offer you God's forgiveness. Above all, show common sense in confession, but by all means, do it!

I’m going to close by reading a passage about the practice of what we’ve talked about, from Richard Foster’s book:

Although I had read in the Bible about the ministry of confession in the Christian brotherhood, I had never experienced it until I was pastoring my first church. I did not take the difficult step of laying bare my inner life to another out of any deep burden or sense of sin. I did not feel there was anything wrong in the least – except one thing. I longed for more power to do the work of God… “Lord,” I prayed, “is there more you want to bring into my life? I want to be conquered and ruled by you. If there is anything blocking the flow of your power, reveal it to me.” He did…

Foster began the process of examining his life and writing down everything he could think of. He divided his life into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. He asked God to reveal anything in his life that needed either forgiveness or healing or both. Whenever anything surfaced, no matter how small, he wrote it down.

He continues:

Paper in hand, I went to a brother in Christ. I had made arrangements with him a week ahead so he understood the purpose of our meeting. Slowly, sometimes painfully, I read my sheet, adding only those comments to make the sin clear. When I had finished, I began to return the paper to my briefcase. Wisely, my counselor/confessor gently stopped my hand and took the sheet of paper. Without a word he took a wastebasket, and, as I watched, he tore the paper into hundreds of tiny pieces and dropped them into it. That powerful, nonverbal expression of forgiveness was followed by a simple absolution. My sins, I knew, were as far away as the east is from the west.

Next, my friend, with the laying on of hands, prayed a prayer of healing for all the sorrows and hurts of the past. The power of that prayer lives with me today.

I cannot say I experienced any dramatic feelings. I did not. In fact, the entire experience was an act of sheer obedience without compelling feelings in the least. But I am convinced it set me free in ways I had not known before. It seemed that I was released to explore what were for me new and uncharted regions of the Spirit. Following that event, I began to move into several of the Disciplines described in this book that I had not experienced before. Was there a casual connection? I do not know, and frankly I do not care. It is enough to have obeyed the inner prompting from above.

There was one interesting sidelight. The exposure of my humanity evidently sparked a freedom in my counselor/friend, for, directly following his prayer for me, he was able to express a deep and troubling sin that he had been unable to confess until then. Freedom begets freedom.